According to the Royal-watchers this week, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have cancelled their ski holiday for fear of upsetting the hoi polloi in advance of impending economic meltdown and subsequent zombie apocalypse.

“William and Catherine appreciate that not everyone can afford to go skiing and that pictures of them on the slopes might send out the wrong signal.” said a courtier, according to the Telegraph Online. (They still have ‘courtiers’? How very Louis XVI.)

Really, what santimonious po-faced PR monkey came up with that one? It’s always been the case that not everyone can afford to go skiing, but that hasn’t stopped Wills and his bird (or indeed any of the rest of us) in the past. Some people can’t afford to heat their houses either, but I’m not about to leave all the windows open and freeze my tits off in sympathy, and I can’t imagine the royal newlyweds are either. Besides, what are they going to do instead? Don hair shirts and spend the festive period volunteering with Crisis at Christmas? It’s more likely to be designer ballgowns, vintage champers and stuffy social etiquette at one of the family’s several stately homes, I suggest, and none of the rest of us can afford that either, so they might just as well have gone skiing and enjoyed themselves.

I’m not entirely sure where the British press gets this idea that skiing is some kind of exclusive upmarket activity for posh people anyway. Clearly they’ve never taken a close look at the regulars in most ski resorts. Granted it’s never going to be as cheap as a week in a caravan in Wales, but there’s no real need to spend your cleaner’s annual wage on it either.

So Wills, if you’re reading this, here are my top five reasons for telling the PR monkey to put it wherever he puts his nuts.

Inevitable side effect of any kind of apocalypse.

1. We want your money. In fact the worse this apocalypse business gets the more we want it and the more of it we want. Ski resorts are full of people with precarious low-paid seasonal jobs, and businesses with five months in which to make enough money to last them the remaining seven, so bring the Coutts gold card with you and convince us that the whole trickle-down theory thing might just have some credibility. In fact, come for a month. Bring your mates as well. And make sure everyone else knows you’re doing it – the last thing we all need is for people to get the idea they should cut down on their skiing.

2. It supports British industry. Oh, all right, staying in some fancy chalet in Klosters isn’t doing much for the UK ski industry, but you don’t actually have to do it like that. Book with a UK tour op instead. I’m not suggesting you rub shoulders with the great unwashed in one of Crystal’s clubhotels, but I’m sure you could find something suitable with the likes of Consensio. Yes, I know your uncle got rinsed for £20,000 when Descent International went to the wall, but you’d have to be really unlucky for that to happen twice, right?

3. It provides employment for hard-working British youngsters desperate for a first step on the career ladder and not in any way out here to party themselves into oblivion and ski their nuts off. Again, you won’t see many of them if you insist on the Klosters private chalet experience, but think of the boost your presence on the slopes will give to the industry as a whole, creating many more barely paid jobs with exploitative employers offering Victorian wages and third world living conditions.

4. The pair of you are a lot better looking than George Osborne. If we’re going to have our pistes and bars roped off for toffs they might as well be toffs worth gawping at.

Time to get it out of mothballs? Probably not, really.

5. Nobody cares. You didn’t get carted off to the guillotine when you spent 10 days in a private luxury island paradise in the Seychelles, so I can’t see the mob tearing themselves away from their flat screen TVs over a mere ski holiday. No doubt you’ll see a certain amount of self-righteous huffing and puffing from the tabloids, but since both editors and readers have the attention spans of mentally impaired goldfish, they’ll be back on paedophiles and cures for cancer after five minutes and no-one will be any the wiser. You have, I’m afraid, cancelled a perfectly good ski trip for absolutely sod all.

3 Responses to Hair shirts for his highness

The huffing and puffing is more likely to come from the Grauniad these days. The red tops would be delighted at the chance of another photocall with these two I would think.
Of course the no-brainers who comment in the DT would have a field day but who cares what they think?